Hi, you've reached the home page of Maarten L. Hekkelman. I'm a software developer and I'm currently employed at the CMBI as a scientific researcher. In a former life I had a company called Hekkelman Programmatuur that wrote commercial software like spreadsheets (Sum-It) and text editors (Pe, Pepper).
Sum-It! (or Sum•It as it was first called) was my first commercial software. It was a spreadsheet for MacOS 6. I ported it to BeOS around 1996 and it was one of the first commercial applications for this exciting OS. The BeOS version of Sum-It was eventually released as open source.
Since there was hardly any software for BeOS at the time, I decided to create a text editor in the tradition of Mac text editors like BBEdit. After the demise of the BeOS cult I released the Pe source code under a BSD license. Pe is still available and even has a wikipedia page.
For some time after Be's infamous Focus Shift I thought Mac OS X would be the next great thing. And so I 'ported' Pe, but since the new code had so little in common with Pe and the name was a bit embarassing, I decided to rename it to Pepper. This was in fact the very first commercial application available for Mac OS X at the date of launch even though others now claim this.
Pepper eventually became a cross platform application running on Windows and X and then sold to someone who's taking good care of it now.
After selling Pepper I found out I had become a real text editor junkie and started yet another, almost from scratch (just using a small bit of Pe code). This editor started life on MacOS X but then was ported to GTK and eventually to Windows 7. It is fairly bare bones, but I'm using it daily.
MRS is a suite of software tools to do full text indexing and information retrieval. At the CMBI we use it to make over 1.5 terabyte of biological data searchable. MRS can be found at http://mrs.cmbi.ru.nl/.
A decent and robust XML parser writtin in C++ was something I longed for a long time, so I decided to write my own. But libzeep is more, it is a library you can use to easily create SOAP servers in C++. Libzeep can be found at http://www.cmbi.ru.nl/libzeep.
My boss wrote some software called WHAT IF to do all kinds of calculations on protein molecular structures. Unfortunately WHAT IF is an interactive program written in FORTRAN and thus not very easily converted into a web service. And as you know, all the hip bioinformaticians are using webservices today. So I wrote an application that acts as a webservice, translating SOAP messages into WHAT IF commands and parsing WHAT IF output back into SOAP replies using a specially developed scripting language.
More information can be found in the article on WIWS.